~ Amy's Creations ~
Let them eat cake!
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My baby girl's wedding cake |
Beginning with my daughter's wedding in August, 2004, I have taken to decorating cakes. I have not yet had any training, and there are certainly classes I would love to attend to learn how to do some of the more intricate sweets like the different kinds and types of flowers and other methods of decorating, but for someone who didn't know her butt from a hole in the ground, I think you would have to admit, I have not done half bad!
As I said, the first cake I did was for my daughter's wedding. I never in a gazillion years thought I would do any such thing as bake and put together a multi-tiered wedding cake, but that is exactly what I wound up doing!
I was inspired to do this insane thing after I asked a friend who bakes, and refuses to do wedding cakes because they are so stressful, and after pricing some basic wedding cakes at local bakeries and caterers. With the urging of my friend the baker and my mother, of all people, I deigned to undertake baking a wedding cake.
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Close-up of the top layer of Sarah's cake. |
Hey... when it's a couple of cake mixes and frosting from Wal-Mart compared to anywhere between $300 and $500 for what Sarah wanted, it was really a no-brainer decision on my part. I do admit I invested quite a bit of money in my cake supplies, far more than "a couple of cake mixes and frosting" implies, but still, I would have paid far more to have had a caterer do her cake.
In the close-up of the top layer of Sarah's wedding cake it is easy to see the different colors that went into making the roses. Some of the roses looked to have a touch of lavender in a light blue rose, while others looked to have a touch of light blue in a lavender rose.
For a first attempt I think I did pretty good. When Rob saw the cake after I had assembled it he could not stop marveling at what I had been able to actually create and put together. He would look at me and say, YOU did that! and I would look at him and say, I did that!
Once I had the wedding - or rather the BRIDE'S - cake finished I had another to do. They had decided they wanted a groom's cake, too, common in these more southern states. There could not have been more difference between the two cakes if one had come from Mars and the other from Jupiter...
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The groom's cake, Sarah's wedding |
Where the bride's cake was white cake with white fondant frosting and decorations along with the lavender-ish/pale blue roses, the groom wanted something entirely different. He wanted his cake to be chocolate-chocolate-chocolate with strawberries. The result we wound up with was dark chocolate cake with dark chocolate filling and frosting and dark chocolate decorations, with strawberries added, and drizzled all over with dark chocolate. Yes. Strawberries, and FRESH strawberries at that, and it was SEPTEMBER!
That groom's cake turned out to be what I
thought was a
royal mess. By the time it was set up on the cake table at the reception it had
soaked through the doilies I had placed under it. And once that cake was set up,
they wasted no time at all digging in to it... I have no idea how big the pieces
were cut off that cake but it was gone, finished, consumed in record time.
Don't stop there, go on to...